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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25796089">i'll form clouds, i'll float this house, we won't run dry, i promise</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling'>Ashling</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Compliant, Drunkenness, Established Relationship, F/M, Happy Ending, I know it isn't a ficlet but just, Relationship Study, Sam O'Neill just CHUGGING i love my fiancée juice, Week of Ficlets, Week of Ficlets: Unforgotten 2020, im SOFT! YOU CAN TELL ANYONE WHO WANTS TO KNOW!, that's the theme, you can call Sam O'Neill many things but fickle isn't one of them</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 09:42:37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,981</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25796089</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Disappointment should come with some surprise, but somehow, hers didn’t. "Never mind," she said. "Rain falls and we enjoy it. I'm no meteor."</i><br/><i>Meteorologist is what she meant. "No," I said, trying for salvage, "but you are a star, á stor."</i> </p><p>Cassie chose Sam. That was a conscious decision. What she doesn't know is that Sam chose her, too.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Cassie Maddox/Sam O'Neill</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>i'll form clouds, i'll float this house, we won't run dry, i promise</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unforgotten/gifts">Unforgotten</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>My Cassie can handle her liquor. She doesn’t spend on much, but she spends on whiskey, and if you ask me, there’s no better value for money in the world. She's not shy, but the way she talks late of a tipsy Thursday evening is like nothing else, clear and constant as an icy mountain stream, unbroken by the slightest hesitation. And maybe it's her generosity with the bottle, but I think she looks different when she's like that too, when she's starry-eyed and sitting on the window seat with her knees against her chest and her right hand clasping he left ankle, right hand left ankle always. Her dark head silhouetted against the city lights, the curls softening it to a halo. Nobody else sees her like this.</p><p>I had a suspect tell me once that I was only investigating him because I was jealous of his house, his job, his life. I looked around at the vaulted emptiness of the foyer, the stainless steel fridge that could hold more food than one man could ever eat in a month, the French windows too tall for a window seat. He didn’t know what he was talking about. Jealousy is out of the equation, not because I think I'm better than he is, but because I got lucky. I know I got lucky, and I'm not ashamed of it. I thought Cassie knew that. I was wrong.</p><p>I learned my mistake on a Saturday night after a long day working overtime on several interviews. I had been tag-teaming witnesses with Quigley, who is hands-down the worst partner the squad has to offer, so I had plenty of new information to process, but he wasn't any help. By the time I got home, my mind was crammed and buzzing, and I knew better than to expect it to shut up for a long, long time, so when I got home and found a note on the fridge reminding me that Cassie was taking Susanna out for her birthday, I was glad of the silence. I cooked for a long while, pasta dough to sheets to little square ravioli, crimping each square edge with a fork. When I put the extras into the fridge, all stacked in layers of parchment paper in an old cookie tin, I felt nearly human again. </p><p>And then the front door swung open and Cassie stumbled in, well beyond tipsy, all the way to drunk. I did say she could handle her liquor, but when it comes to her friends and the bewilderingly complex rules of their drinking games, all bets are off.</p><p>"Hey," she said, grinning like a girl as she leaned on the coat closet door, turning me into a boy that fast and that easy. </p><p>The advantage to having a small apartment was that it took me no time at all to get to her. I locked the door because if I didn't do it first, I'd forget. Before the bolt thudded home, Cassie already had her hand on my arm and her tongue somewhere in the middle of a story about Susanna and a man and a leather jacket and a stray cat. I didn't understand most of it, but I let it roll over me. When I knelt to undo the laces on one of her combat boots, she balanced herself with one hand on my bent head so she could pick at the laces of the other one. She took twice as long as I did and I stayed kneeling till she was done. When I stood up, she cupped my face. I could feel how cold her hands were even through my beard. I thought she was going to kiss me.</p><p>Instead, she said, "You don't know, do you? You don't know why?" Her brightness was fading away into something sweet and grave and sad. I thought I had done a good job in figuring out that the man with the leather jacket was Susanna's ex, but either Cassie's questions were a complete non sequitur, or I didn't understand the story at all. </p><p>I covered her cold hands with mine. "I don't know why what?" I said.</p><p>Her cheeks were flushed. "If you don't know why it happens, then you can't even predict when it will end," she said. "When there's rain, hiccups, earthquakes, murder. When people fall in love."</p><p>"You're right," I said. "I don't know why people fall in love, most of the time." This much I could figure out, maybe.</p><p>"Is it harder to see from the inside?" Cassie said.</p><p>"Sorry, what?" </p><p>"Is it harder to see from the inside," she repeated, patiently.</p><p>I thought, by then, I understood. "Maybe," I said. "It's not easier."</p><p>Disappointment should come with some surprise, but somehow, hers didn’t. "Never mind," she said. "Rain falls and we enjoy it. I'm no meteor."</p><p>I knew she meant meteorologist, but I said, “You’re no meteor,” because I was trying for salvage. “But you are a star, á stor."</p><p>Cassie took her hands away from her face and her head made a hollow thud against the coat closet door. She looked terribly tired.</p><p>I did not reach to her, but my voice went as gentle as I could make it go. "Come to bed, so."</p><p>She pushed off the door and made her way back to our room, and even as I picked up her red coat, slick with rain, up off the floor and hung it properly, even as I poured her a glass of water, even as I brushed my teeth and resisted the urge to weigh myself and put on the oversized Florida t-shirt one of my ancient aunts had gotten me for Christmas, I knew I had made the wrong decision, somewhere along the line. I had said the wrong thing, somehow. I was gripped by the growing conviction that I had to say <em> something </em>to get the train back on its tracks, before sleep locked us into this and sealed off the memory. But even with a woman you love very much, it is not wise to ask her, when she’s drunk, where along the line you fucked up. You might get more than you bargained for. So I waited and waited until I couldn’t anymore, until she had drained the glass and brushed her own teeth and taken off her bra from under her shirt and gotten into bed. She was a splash of dark curls on the pillow, a huddled shape under the covers like a contented cat, a pale face reflecting the light of her phone as she flipped through her emails.</p><p>"Cassie?" I said.</p><p>"Hm?" She didn’t look up.</p><p>"I'm not going anywhere."</p><p>"All right," she said, but she wasn't very good at pretending this drunk and sleepy and I could tell she only said it to pacify me. Perhaps she didn't know what I meant. Perhaps she did, but she was done with the conversation.</p><p>"It's not like rain," I said, sitting there on my side of the bed and feeling helpless. "It doesn't come and go. I love you. I'm not going anywhere."</p><p>"That's good," Cassie said. She put down her phone and propped herself on one arm so she could kiss my cheek. "Can you turn off the light?" </p><p>The light was off, but there was a full moon. I got up and closed the curtains. When I laid down beside her, she kissed my cheek again, and I couldn’t tell if that meant something, or if it only meant that she had forgotten she’d already kissed me the once. I kissed her back, and she was asleep nearly that fast. </p><p>When my thoughts crowded in, I resisted the urge to reach for my own phone and breathed deep, instead. I inherited what my dad calls “the gift”, which sounds mysterious and splendid but which is really a combined ability to fall asleep anywhere and to not flinch at anything. But that night, the gift was nowhere to be found. So I gave it half an hour, and when not even syncing my breathing up with Cassie’s worked, I finally hauled myself out of bed and went to boil a second batch of ravioli. And to write.</p><p>When I bought the engagement ring, Cassie and I hadn’t been dating long—I hadn’t even met her aunt, didn’t have a key to her place, wasn’t allowed to take her anywhere one of the lads might spot us. I knew it was reckless, because if I had proposed, she wouldn’t have accepted. But I was so sure that I would have to ask her to marry me one day, even to hear her say no, that buying a ring just seemed like working a bit ahead. And that was the pattern for us, ever afterwards. I bought my suit before she bought her dress, I started looking up venues before she did, I had my list of invitations ready first even though hers was a fourth of the size, and this wasn't because Cassie was lazy; I just liked to work ahead. I always had.</p><p>Except that the wedding was in six days and I still hadn't written my vows.</p><p>With the ravioli in the pot and a fresh sheet of paper on the table, I sat down to write, more nervous than ever. It wasn't that I had trouble telling Cassie I loved her; I did that explicitly at least once a day the whole time we were engaged, and I told her silently for months before that. It wasn't that I had trouble telling Cassie what I liked about her; I did that all the time too, partly because every now and then I could make her blush, partly because there was so much to say. But vows are public, and short, and I couldn't think of how to possibly tell Cassie everything she needed to know in five minutes with everybody we knew watching. The premise was simple, but it sounded trite, exaggerated, and silly. When I say I looked for her my whole life, I mean it. Maybe I didn't know exactly what I was searching for, but always, <em>always, </em>I wanted to find someone that I could let in.</p><p>To tell Cassie why I had been looking for her, I would have to tell her the whole tangled Gordian knot of my grandmother's will.</p><p>How it was to watch the people I had grown up with turn to lying and backstabbing and competing accounts of her mental health from three different psychologists over the family farm. The lawyers in their dark suits. I would have to tell her about how my cousin Connie had brought cake every time Christmas rolled around, a gorgeous one smothered in icing and heavy with molasses and so rich that not even my father could eat more than one slice in a sitting, but the year after the will got settled, she brought nothing and then said she forgot. Not that a cake mattered—I was somewhere in my mid-twenties then—but something about that embarrassed me horribly, because we had turned into one of <em>those </em>families, we had turned into something I didn't understand, like we were living in reality TV. We were petty and we were mean and we held grudges and we did it over the grubbiest possible reasons, and we did it after we had all spent such long and patient hours in hospital, often together, often playing cards or reminiscing or even singing together old songs that my grandmother liked. One day we were almost sacred in our closeness and the next day we were pigs fighting over a trough.</p><p>I say <em>we</em>. I spent most of that time saying nothing, doing nothing. Making sure my two youngest cousins didn't get into a fistfight. Thinking I'd rather be at a 3am stakeout. Eventually, very late one night, getting into an insane and unjustifiable shouting match with my own mother over what channel she had on the TV, because what I really wanted to do was yell at her that she should have warned me they would be like this, but I couldn't do that, because I knew she hadn't known our family was capable of it either. Not really, not deep down. And the next day we got up and were pleasant to each other at breakfast and never spoke about it again. To tell Cassie why I had been looking for her, I would have to explain that.</p><p>To tell Cassie why I had been looking for her, I would have to tell her about the summer I went to live with my uncle in Dublin.</p><p>I was nine, and it was campaign season. His seat was safe, but there was another candidate, Eddie Whelan, who was fighting tooth and nail to turn a seat that our party hadn't had for almost a decade. I remember going out with my uncle to knock doors for the first time, on Whelan's behalf, so swept up in the camaraderie of the young volunteers and the thrilling reactions my uncle could get out of people just by showing up: affection, fascination, amusement, antipathy. I was only supposed to go with him for a couple hours in the morning, but I stuck it out until my feet were so blistered I couldn't walk anymore, and I was back the next week with better shoes, and I volunteered the whole summer long.</p><p>Without my ma there to stop me, I ate a popsicle every hour on the hour and my tongue went blue for three days, but my uncle just laughed and said that was a small price to pay for such a hard worker. I had the first drink of my life off of one of the volunteers when we were sat up late putting stamps on campaign mail, and it tasted so bad I spat it back out, splattering some half-dozen envelopes. All the other volunteers laughed, but I knew they weren't laughing at me. Now I know what a shitty little office that was, with no proper ceiling, pipes exposed, but at the time I didn't think anything of it. I hung balloons from them (in party colors, of course) and ran to dump out the bucket every few hours when it was full to overflowing from the drip.</p><p>When I stayed up to see the election results, I knew the name of every volunteer in the room, and gone out as a sort of team mascot on door-knocking with every one of them, too. And then I cried over Whelan twice: once, then, at eight, when he lost for the first time, and then later, at nineteen, when I was drunk and at a party and saw on the news that after a decade of trying, he'd finally won.</p><p>I wish I could say that all this was because he was charismatic, or that he had wonderful policies, or that he had been kind to me, but the truth is, I don't even remember meeting the man and his one distinguishing trait was his stubbornness. The truth is, I cared because I was on his team. Because I had worked so hard. Because my team had Millie who gave me the unlimited popsicles, and Aoife who let me hold her five-week-old baby, and Jim who swore so spectacularly that I worshipped the ground he walked on.  Because he was on my uncle's team, and my uncle was family, and my uncle knew who deserved to get elected and who didn't. I was eight, but that sort of thing stretches pretty long. By the time I found out who my uncle really was, somewhere in my thirties, the summer of the first Whelan campaign had become so stamped into my history that it had taken on an almost mythological quality. I knew I could find out if Whelan was rotten at the core too, but couldn't bear to go and find out. I still don't know. To tell Cassie why I had been looking for her, I would have to explain that.</p><p>To tell Cassie why I had been looking for her, I would have to tell her about my first partner, way back before I was even a detective. Mulligan, monstrously tall, a chain-smoker, an avid fan of Bob Dylan. We weren't assigned to a particularly rough beat, but five months into it, we had a stroke of luck, or bad luck, and got called over the radio to go investigate an armed robbery taking place. By the time we got there, there were already two officers on the scene, and shouting, and a whole lot of smoke—something was on fire—and I was busy coughing and squinting when the shots rang out. It sounded like something from a movie. It didn't sound real.</p><p>One of the robbers got hit in the leg, and there I was proud of myself for not puking my guts out, proud that I managed to handcuff one of the other robbers, before I stopped to wonder why the hell a beat cop had a handgun. Your first partner is the one who's supposed to teach you the ropes, everything from what not to do at a cop bar to what to tell the shrink for your psych eval to how to get promoted. Mine handed me a report, at 2am, when I had stopped shaking, and I signed off on it without reading the whole thing. I'll have to live with that for the rest of my life.</p><p>IA came around to ask me about that report, among other things, and I lied to them, the way you're supposed to, the way a good partner does. I can't blame the time and the shock for that. When the shots rang out, Mulligan had stepped to his left, in front of me, and the fact that he'd rather get shot than watch me get shot made me think that he couldn't have been wrong, but by the time IA was done with their questions about this report I hadn't read, I knew I had fucked up, and I said as much. I still don't know why they didn't take me down with him. I'd like to think it was because they saw that I was young and dumb and that I would never do that again. But the man who had been hit in the leg was hit in the femoral artery. He bled out in the ambulance. The officer who shot him had been stalking his wife, and the gun wasn't department-issue; it had been lost in the evidence locker a long time ago. To this day I'm relieved that that Mulligan never asked me to testify on his behalf, because I don't know what I would have done. I know what I would do now, of course, but that's little comfort. To tell Cassie why I had been looking for her, I would have to explain that.</p><p>To tell Cassie why I had been looking for her, I would have to tell her that I was a fool for a reason. Maybe I did fall for just about everything under the sun, maybe I did have have faith in place of a brain, maybe I deserved to get knocked down so hard I couldn't get back up, but it took me some thirty years to finally grow up because I knew the real thing was out there. I knew there were people worth a faith so pure that it was blind. I saw my mother and my father, growing up, and they were nothing spectacular in a way you could capture in a picture, but they never lied to each other, or to us children. They were good in a way that sounds simultaneously boring enough to put a puppy to sleep, and unreal enough to make saints with. My mother had a temper and my father subscribed to some truly antiquated ideas, but they were so quietly kind that I only found out about half the things they did after the fact. I thought everybody's mother made meals for sick friends and took other people's kids for weeks at a time when they were "between places". I thought everybody's father would drive fifteen minutes extra every morning to drop off the neighbor at work, or pore over a distant cousin's immigration paperwork every night for three weeks, pro bono. They did the job in front of them when it was in front of them, because they didn't see any other choice; they trusted each other the way they trusted the sun would rise in the morning, and I expected that from the world. I wanted that. I was beginning to think I would never find it; I hadn't dated in a few years; I avoided ever having a partner on the Murder squad; I bought a house sized only for myself even though I wanted kids.</p><p>I can't tell Cassie about the moment I knew that she was the one I was looking for, because she probably still recalls that day as the second-worst day of her life. Rosalind's voice, even over the crackle of the comm, was pure cruelty, and Cassie kept opening herself up more and more, and I knew that nobody in the van except for Rob Ryan could possibly understand what she was sacrificing, but I still felt an incredulity that we weren't all going to stop this, the way we'd go in if an undercover was getting tortured on mic. It struck me then (and for once, I was right on first instinct) that Cassie was doing the job in front of her. That Katy needed her, and Rosalind had to be stopped, and Cassie was the only one of us brave enough, strong enough, smart enough to get to her. Even when Rob fucked up and Rosalind got away, I couldn't get over it, that spark of recognition: she was the real thing, and I couldn't miss it.</p><p>Everything else is window dressing. I love the way she laughs at my bad jokes, I love the way her nose scrunches up when I have her taste-test something she doesn't like, I love how steady her hands are on her gun when we go to the range, I love the subtlety of her skill in the interview room, but all of these things are just extra. I could sign off on any report Cassie wrote. I could campaign for her, I could pray to her gods, I could fight for her or trust her to fight for me, I could make like Breslin and cover up a death for her without knowing the details because I do, I do think that she would get it right. There's maybe only three or four reasons you could ever have to kill a person, but I could trust that her reason would be one of those. Love didn't just happen to me. All my life, I had been waiting for someone I would follow into the dark if I had to. Cassie is that person.</p><p>But that's not five minutes, and it sure as hell isn't public.</p><p>I realized that, the night five days before our wedding, with the ravioli turning into goo in the pot and the page still blank in front of me. I could tell her later, maybe, when she wasn't drunk. Maybe when I was drunk. But not then. So I turned off the stove, and I scrunched the paper into a ball, and I went back to bed with my head so close to hers on the pillow that I could hear her breathing, with the same thoughts still thrumming in my head, insistent. <em>Don't forget.</em> I didn't.</p><p>I will tell her, one day.</p>
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